A summary of our conversations and plans so far, including discussions at the recent Kosmos Summit:
Long-term goal
Contributors and kredits holders can withdraw funds for expenses, monthly grants, and dividends to their wallet, automatically managed by a smart contract, and based on rules and calculations agreed upon beforehand
Short-term goal
Trial expense reimbursements, monthly grants, and dividends, based on ongoing testnet data, and paid out manually from a multi-sig wallet with core contributor keys
Ideas for grants/dividends
Must be a mix of covering current development and rewarding people for past contributions and overall amount of personal investment in the project
Must be fair for both current long-term contributors, who have never seen rewards, but also incentivize new contributors properly, Problem for new contributors to reach kredits amounts on par with early contributors in reasonable amount of time? Need to factor in overall dilution with more contributors!)
Pay out 10% of budget monthly (leaving a part of the budget for projected expenses untouched). This effectively always leaves a runway, with payouts automatically decreasing every month, unless new money flows into the system -> incentive for contributors to make the project financially sustainable
Pay out n% of monthly grants only for kredits earned during the last month (actually since last payout block). Pay out the remaining n% as dividends to all current kredits holders (more difficult without self-payouts; perhaps needs to go to ERC271 holders as well for now).
There’s a simple modeling sheet available to play with the relevant numbers and percentages for example contributors over multi-year timeframe. See below.
To do
Create some kind of shared document/sheet (see reply below) (@Kredits)
Pick block height for beginning of first cycle (@Kredits)
Propose/decide block amount for general cycle lengths (@Kredits)
Decide on initial dividend numbers/rules/concept/calculation (@Core)
Find alternative term for “dividends” (describes the concept well, but is too reminiscent of traditional corporations) (@Core)
During the dividends session today, we have created some spreadsheets to visualize and play with numbers regarding initial budget, revenue, salaries and dividends for various contributor profiles:
There’s an undocumented problem with the manual prototype, which I forgot about:
It will be rather difficult to pay out to kredits holders instead of contributors for the dividend grants, when it’s not managed by a contract directly. We need to come up with a rough MVP-compatible plan for that, and I think it may end up being to only pay out to contributors during the manual trial.
As mentioned in the call yesterday, we should address the issue of rewarding previous work toward Kosmos before we had the Kredits system in place. I know for myself, I had more time and was working much harder on Sockethub development, specifically for Kosmos use- earlier on, and by the time the Kredits system was implemented I was at a low point in my free time. So it would be nice to have some of that early work acknowledged in the form of some juicy Kredits.
I know there are others who also put in work before the Kredits system was implemented so we should probably get this settled now so we can move forward all feeling good. It’s related to this thread as it should be part of the todo checklist, so maybe we could figure out a system for how best to do this? Maybe using a system to generate some sort of a pie chart. Some rough ideas:
Listing out PRs and or major work in as best we can place them into our current contribution tags (1, 2, 3).
Alternatively, we can just loosely summarize what kind of work we did.
Or, doing none of that and just having the pie chart drawn up based on a general consensus/discussion
I’m not sure which is the best way, but am open to any options that we all feel good about. Does any one else have other ideas? @Core
EDIT: I remembered after posting this that while the Kredits system has been up for about 2 years, it wasn’t integrated with Sockethub activity until about 1 year ago.
It seems you didn’t catch my explanation in the call yesterday. We already went through the whole process of looking at numbers, coming up with the amount to be kredited, and deciding on it in a vote. This actually took us quite some time, and multiple calls.
I was pretty sure that you were part of that process, but it now it looks like it probably happened during a time frame when you didn’t participate much in the project.
The number is 200,000 kredits, and IIRC we do have minimal documentation somewhere (maybe on GitHub) for how we arrived at it. Maybe someone can help with finding that information again? I think @galfert played a major role there?
We need the details anyway, for documenting it for everyone else and attaching that information to the kredits records.
@raucao Ah ok, yeah, it was probably during a time when I was unable to make the calls. While I do remember you mentioning that it was going to happen, I wasn’t aware of what the conclusion was. Anyway, I’m glad it’s all done. If there’s a link I’d like to have a look.
I also thought that @slvrbckt was in at least some of the discussions about this topic.
I tried to find any documentation about how we arrived at the number yesterday after our call, but couldn’t find any.
So what we did was, we said everybody should come up with a number until the next call. Then in that call everybody wrote their number on a piece of paper and showed it into the camera at the same time. Similar to planning poker in SCRUM. That way nobody was influenced by any of the others’ numbers.
If I remember correctly, all numbers were quite close to each other. So after some more discussion, we ended on a number of small, medium and large contributions that felt right to everybody (and that summed up to a nice even amount of 200,000 kredits). I can’t remember the exact split, but it might have been 80 small, 40 medium and 20 large contributions.
OK, but what does that mean? 80/40/20 of what to who? I’m not sure I understand.
I remember being around for a couple calls but the discussion got pushed back for one reason or another because someone wasn’t on the call, then I think when it happened I wasn’t on the call.
Again, we had multiple calls about this, not just one. You weren’t joining them for a few months in between. This has to be documented in more detail for everyone, including you, so please just wait for that to happen. Thanks!
we ended on a number of small, medium and large contributions that felt right to everybody
…
I can’t remember the exact split, but it might have been 80 small, 40 medium and 20 large contributions.
@raucao I read @galfert’s post in full, no need to re-paste what he wrote. While I understand the sentence construction, I’m missing something or otherwise don’t understand what it actually means.
I’m not making any point about number of calls, so I’m not sure what that has to do with it. The point of my comment was not to discuss number of calls, but rather in response to @galfert thinking I was there, that it’s probably because I was there for some calls where it was postponed.
